Humans are rational beings, but beyond rationality, humans are complex creatures with emotions,
dreams, aspirations, imaginations, and agency. Humans make conscious choices every day and
even the most routine activity of eating breakfast can open a plethora of questions. Are you going
to cook your own food or just eat out? If you dine out, are you going to a nearby café or to your
favorite place? What are you going to order, something new, your preferred food, or something
cheaper? To a spatial scientist, these questions (choices) mean nothing; spatial science cannot
explain the intricacies of a creative and thinking human being. The science is good when
explaining the physical world, but it cannot rationalize the humanity of humans. Spatial science
reduced humans as hypothesis to a research and classified emotions, dreams, aspirations,
imaginations as obstruction to the pursuit of science. Simply put, human emotions have no place
in spatial science.
This overt exclusion of humanness was one of the pitfalls of spatial science giving rise to the
emergence of humanistic geography. Humanistic geography, as a direct response to spatial science,
placed humans and human consciousness, feeling, thoughts, and emotions as the foreground of
geographical thinking by considering the relationship between human and world through the lens
of human experience. The key proponents of this school of thought included Yi-Fu Tuan, David
Ley, Edward Relph, Anne Buttimer, and David Seamon. Although their works echoed different
approaches and viewpoints, they agreed in unison that people are not just hypothesis in a research
but rather intentional beings with their own biases. They also established that humanistic
geography is the study of people-in-the-world or being-in-the-world. This concept highlights the
core idea in humanistic geography that there is an undeniable connection between humans and the
world they occupy; thus, there is a pressing need to center humans in the geographical idea. Tuan
made an important discussion of dwelling and home; home being at the center ground of
humanistic initiative. Human beings inhabit the world, but for Tuan, the key question was how do
we make it meaningful; how do we make it a home? To fully grasp how to make the world a home,
it is important to understand how humans and nonhuman things relate to the world. In animal
geography, geographers investigate how animals exist with humans and how animals’ agency
impacted human lives in different settings. Actor-network theory (ANT) is one of the most
significant theoretical turn on more-than-human geographies and its most important insight was
that the agency of humans in the production of the world is complemented and enabled by the
agency of the nonhuman world. In ANT, it is not only humans and animals who have agency; even
inanimate objects have agency. In a usual laboratory setting for an instance, people, ideas, and
things create a network for a particular purpose (creation of new vaccine, discovery of a new
element). ANT emphasized the importance of agency and networks. A network not only includes
people but also objects that have been enrolled into the network and their connectedness within
the network is what makes it possible to create things. However, it is important to note the things
only gain agency when they are enrolled into a network.
Spatial science used sets of mathematical models to explain phenomena, but for the case of
humanistic geography, concepts such as emotions, human consciousness, etc., are conceptual. You
cannot model being-in-the-world using mathematical equations; thus, humanists rely on
qualitative methods to describe and explain their studies. The success of humanistic geography
gave authority to interviews, oral history, participant observation, textual and visual analysis, and
self-reflection as viable qualitative methods for contemporary geographical scholars.
Although humanistic geography was a direct response to spatial science, humanistic geographers
drew its inspiration from existentialism and most significantly to phenomenology. Phenomenology
is concerned with finding the fundamental nature of things. For phenomenology, it is of paramount
importance to understand first what it is you are studying; thus, the question of “what is a place?”
became one of the most important theoretical engagements in humanistic geography. In spatial
science, a place is an objective point anywhere in the world that can be located thru coordinates.
For a humanist, a place is much more layered; it is also a physical location that can be traced using
coordinates, but beyond that, a place has a meaning. My workplace in Malate is a place you can
easily find the coordinates using Google maps or Google Street View, but for me, it has been a
second home for eight years. In this place, I experience rollercoaster of emotions from simple
triumphs to disappointments. This notion of place in humanistic geography describes the
relationship between people and the world in the lens of human experience.
The drastic changes brought about by rapid industrialization and globalization in the past centuries
created various societal issues. Spatial science and humanistic geography have shortcomings when
it comes to addressing issues involving social injustices, equality, exploitation, and oppression.
Geographers felt that their work was irrelevant because they cannot help in solving these issues;
they wanted to make a difference. Collectively, geographers agreed that there was a world outside
the boundaries of academic institutions and that they have obligation beyond the classrooms. This
shift in consciousness brought about an alternative to spatial science and humanism – Marxism or
Marxist geography.
Marxist geographers used the insights of Marxist theory into the geographic discipline not only to
further explain and understand the world, but also to change it. Key to the discussion of Marxist
geography is the debate of production of space (uneven development) and production of nature. In
Marxist geography, space is not just a location or a physical place where things happen, but a
product of human interaction and has a pivotal role in the modes of production such as capitalism.
We are living in a capitalist world partly because of geography. But the question remains “how is
geography helping capitalism to thrive?”. Marx’s study of capitalism showed that capitalism
experiences periodic crises, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the
2007-2008 crisis, among many others, but capitalism proved to be buoyant despite these
downturns. The answer according to Marxist geographers lies in geography. The goal of capitalism
is to produce profit thru lowering production costs. This can be achieved by investing in new
technologies, new machineries, or new fixed assets such as factories and buildings. These
investments to fixed assets will prove to be effective in boosting profits in the short-run, but in the
long run, when market saturates and competitions begin to surface, these invested capital can be
more of a disadvantage for future developments causing profits to dwindle. If this happens,
capitalist companies will try to find another ideal geographical location, preferably places where
labor costs are cheaper or where there is an untapped market, to invest in that will allow generation
of maximum profits. This is one way out of crisis and why capitalism continues to thrive; there is
a constant creation of new geography. This is termed as spatial fix. Thus, it is inherent in the
workings of capitalism that there are developed areas and less developed. This is the general
process of uneven development. These are familiar stories we have already heard before. US
companies transferring production in Asian countries to take advantage of cheaper labor costs.
Another geographical theme that Marxist geographers took head on is the production of nature. At
first glance, you will ask how nature can be produced when it is just there, and it is beyond human
control. Neil Smith provided an argument of two natures. The first nature is the primordial nature,
the nature that is beyond the influence of humans. The second nature is socially produced. First
nature is transformed to second nature thru labor and capital to adhere to the demand of capitalism
of producing profits. Agricultural lands in the rural escape even though far from the hustle and
bustle of cities are considered as second nature because they are manipulated by human labor and
capital. Our national parks no matter how seemingly pristine and well protected are still socially
produced. These parks still fall in the pretext of capitalism because they earn profits. Perhaps, the
most interesting discussion of production of nature in Marxist geography is soil erosion; how this
seemingly natural process is influenced by capitalism. Not all soils are of equal value. Some lands
are valuable because they produce raw materials for production. Some are important for vegetation
and agriculture. Others can be marginally valuable or inconsequential at all; thus, the natural
process of soil erosion as argued by Marxist geographers is not a consequence of natural causes or
human action but a product of the structure of the global economy under capitalism.
In conclusion, the geographical thinking has evolved through time. It was able to resolve the
criticism that it is unscientific through the arrival of spatial science. It was able to absolve itself
from the critique that it is too scientific through the development of humanistic geography. But
perhaps, the boldest of this geographical thought is the Marxist geography because of its active
advocacy for activism and dismantling the status quo. Marxist geography not only tried to explain
the connection of human and the world by considering capitalism and other socio-spatial
arrangements. Its end goal is to reform the system. Upon reading the given texts, several questions
crossed my mind. First, was Marxist geographers successful in challenging and reforming the
status quo? It was 1973 when David Harvey wrote that the world is facing economic problem,
urban problem, and international trade. Forty-seven years after, we are still faced with the same
kind of problems if not worse. Probably the answer to that question is a no. Second, if Marxist
geographers were able to pinpoint the role of geography in capitalism, perhaps geography is also
the key to demolish capitalism, but the bigger question is how? Finally, are we going to see through
the end of these social inequalities? Maybe, only time can tell.